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This is not at all illuminating and is just a typical advocacy piece for more transit funding. Like most of these pieces, it compares road spending and transit

This is not at all illuminating and is just a typical advocacy piece for more transit funding. Like most of these pieces, it compares road spending and transit spending as though this is somehow a useful comparison. It isn't. For rail transit systems, spending includes all labor and capital expenses--train operators, cars, electricity, etc. Road spending does not include the enormous capital investment that citizens and businesses spend for motor vehicles. Putting that problem aside for a moment, it says that transit gets a smaller share of the funding pie. So what? Roads blanket the nation--I don't think this article would suggest operating public transportation to compete with every road. Then there's the usual "OMG induced demand": "road building as already mentioned does nothing to combat traffic" because of induced demand. This is specious. Yes building roads encourages people to go places. That's the point. To top it off the piece says nothing about "why traffic is awful".

supergeek133 11y ago
To your last point, I noticed that too... including that in the title was total clickbait.
nostromo 11y ago
Yeah, the article points out that only 20% of our federal and state transit budgets go to transit, implying that it's underfunded. But it lacks the context that only 5% of Americans use transit...
- goodcanadian 11y ago
  It is a chicken and egg problem: Transit sucks, so no one uses transit. No one uses transit, so funding is sub-optimal. Funding is sub-optimal, so transit sucks. This cycle can be broken by funding transit properly. I have been to plenty of cities where transit was cheap, convenient, and useful. And before someone trots out the density problem, I have been to plenty of places that are far less dense than LA and have far better transit.
  - jim-greer 11y ago
    I'm curious about the sparse places that have good transit... Where do you mean?
    - goodcanadian 11y ago
      Europe, mostly, where what are essentially small towns and villages are often connected by good train or bus service to each other. You may consider it inter-urban rather than intra-urban, but the distances would easily fit within LA, and the density is clearly lower (because there are farms in between).
  - secabeen 11y ago
    You wouldn't know it, but LA has a pretty decent transit system, in terms of one that can get you most places you'd want to go. It's largely bus-based, and can take a while, but it is effective. Compared to some mid-western and southern cities, it's worlds better.
    - goodcanadian 11y ago
      I'll grant that it may be good by US standards, but that is sort of damning it with faint praise. Yes, it is good in the sense that you can get anywhere you want to go, eventually. When I say good, however, I mean comparable to driving in time and convenience.
- bluthru 11y ago
  Spending money on transit is a much better way to alleviate road congestion than building more roads. If you drive, you should be in favor of transit spending.
- j2kun 11y ago
  That's a fat tail issue, though. What percent of Americans who live in an urban environment use public transportation?
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  In Dallas, I was one of the 95% who almost never used transit, because it didn't go to 95% of the places I needed to go.
Tiktaalik 11y ago
> Yes building roads encourages people to go places. That's the point. Building roads encourages people to drive in their cars to places. The problem is that automobile infrastructure is woefully inefficient, expensive and doesn't scale. If you want to create the ability for people to go to places, there's more efficient and cheaper ways to do this than building more roads. One of these methods is public transit.
- supergeek133 11y ago
  Over certain distances, I would agree. For medium/long distance, it can be woefully time inefficient.
  - jowiar 11y ago
    For time efficiency, the implementation is far more of the problem than the actual idea of public transportation (i.e. Philly to Pittsburgh, or DC to Pittsburgh). For traveling distances of ~120-400 miles or so, I'd much rather take a train than drive if the implementation isn't terrible (anything between DC, Philly, and NYC, Barcelona to Madrid, Florence to Rome), largely because the time isn't wasted (I can read a book, do some work, or take a nap). I'm curious how things are going to pan out over the next 20 years, however, as some of these advantages held by not being responsible for piloting the vehicle become available to cars, and how different transportation methods are going to evolve around this. Rail has nasty failure modes due to the inherent sparse graph.
    - supergeek133 11y ago
      Yeah, to your point, that is why some people like to fly these days. It's almost literally the last place you can go and work uninterrupted! Haha.
      - flatline 11y ago
        Used to be a fairly quick way to get around, but since 9/11 the unpredictable security delays and increasingly cramped seating have made it far less tenable. Even a 1 hour flight involves a ~45 minute trip to the airport - including time to park and walk to the terminal; a 2+ hour wait through security because it could take three quarters of that; the hour flight itself; time to disembark at the terminal - bare minimum we are talking a solid 4 hours which could easily turn into 5+ with a not-infrequent delay. You are no longer much ahead of the curve for an equivalent drive of less than 350 miles, at the end of which you would have a car. The expense of flying is prohibitive, and I can't even open my work laptop in the plane because it's a behemoth.
teek 11y ago
> Putting that problem aside for a moment, it says that transit gets a smaller share of the funding pie. So what? Roads blanket the nation--I don't think this article would suggest operating public transportation to compete with every road. If you're going to use the argument that roads are more useful than transit because they cover the whole nation, then you're making the same argument the article is making for transit, just with different parameters. Rather than paint it black and white, both systems are needed to increase overall transportation efficiency as a whole. Transit is effective in dense areas like large cities. Roads are effective in smaller less dense areas where space isn't a premium. Additionally, everyone likes to gloss over the fact that you mention where public transit in the US is largely government owned and operated, therefore the expenses include all costs associated with the entire system. For roads, however, only the road cost is covered. This is a different kind of unfairness. It makes roads and auto travel look cheap because costs are dispersed over different parties and items: government pays for the road, drivers pay for their car and maintenance, buildings hide the cost of private parking. Meanwhile transit systems look expensive because the numbers include all associated expenses. To fix the problem, I actually think transit systems should be allowed to be privatized and treated on the same level as roads, that is just like roads, the government allocates land use for mass transit and private companies operate the system. Additionally most of the recent laws surrounding (free) parking and the interstate highway systems require additional roads and parking for every new development. So ridiculous things start happening like low-income housing in a dense area having unused parking spaces being built to satisfy minimum parking requirements. Downtown road improvements requiring unnecessarily large intersections and allocations to satisfy level of service requirements. > Then there's the usual "OMG induced demand": "road building as already mentioned does nothing to combat traffic" because of induced demand. This is specious. Yes building roads encourages people to go places. That's the point. The problem is roads are a 2D system with limited scalability while cities are 3D environments that often scale in 3 dimensions. Furthermore automobiles most of the time are used to inefficiently carry 1 person but they have a large footprint. So at a certain point, traffic congestion measures actually do not increase throughput linearly based on investment. So if you want "people to go places" you start finding yourself with ridiculously expensive projects that actually just end up making the problem worse. Many cities in the world have found solutions to traffic problems and they involve one of 2 things: 1. Introduce a toll or congestion fee thereby encouraging only those that truly want to use the road to use it. 2. Remove high capacity "arterial" roads thus causing traffic to be more evenly distributed across multiple low throughput paths. The first item operates on the concept that even a relatively small fee will cause standard supply and demand rules to apply rather than users aggressively trying to take advantage of a "free" resource. The second item operates on the concept that traffic distributed across more direct paths will lead to less overall system traffic compared to a system that encourages everyone to take the perceived fastest and highest throughput path.

supergeek133 11y ago

To your last point, I noticed that too... including that in the title was total clickbait.

nostromo 11y ago

Yeah, the article points out that only 20% of our federal and state transit budgets go to transit, implying that it's underfunded. But it lacks the context that only 5% of Americans use transit...

goodcanadian 11y ago
It is a chicken and egg problem: Transit sucks, so no one uses transit. No one uses transit, so funding is sub-optimal. Funding is sub-optimal, so transit sucks. This cycle can be broken by funding transit properly. I have been to plenty of cities where transit was cheap, convenient, and useful. And before someone trots out the density problem, I have been to plenty of places that are far less dense than LA and have far better transit.
- jim-greer 11y ago
  I'm curious about the sparse places that have good transit... Where do you mean?
  - goodcanadian 11y ago
    Europe, mostly, where what are essentially small towns and villages are often connected by good train or bus service to each other. You may consider it inter-urban rather than intra-urban, but the distances would easily fit within LA, and the density is clearly lower (because there are farms in between).
- secabeen 11y ago
  You wouldn't know it, but LA has a pretty decent transit system, in terms of one that can get you most places you'd want to go. It's largely bus-based, and can take a while, but it is effective. Compared to some mid-western and southern cities, it's worlds better.
  - goodcanadian 11y ago
    I'll grant that it may be good by US standards, but that is sort of damning it with faint praise. Yes, it is good in the sense that you can get anywhere you want to go, eventually. When I say good, however, I mean comparable to driving in time and convenience.
bluthru 11y ago
Spending money on transit is a much better way to alleviate road congestion than building more roads. If you drive, you should be in favor of transit spending.
j2kun 11y ago
That's a fat tail issue, though. What percent of Americans who live in an urban environment use public transportation?
pavel_lishin 11y ago
In Dallas, I was one of the 95% who almost never used transit, because it didn't go to 95% of the places I needed to go.

Tiktaalik 11y ago

> Yes building roads encourages people to go places. That's the point. Building roads encourages people to drive in their cars to places. The problem is that automobile infrastructure is woefully inefficient, expensive and doesn't scale. If you want to create the ability for people to go to places, there's more efficient and cheaper ways to do this than building more roads. One of these methods is public transit.

supergeek133 11y ago
Over certain distances, I would agree. For medium/long distance, it can be woefully time inefficient.
- jowiar 11y ago
  For time efficiency, the implementation is far more of the problem than the actual idea of public transportation (i.e. Philly to Pittsburgh, or DC to Pittsburgh). For traveling distances of ~120-400 miles or so, I'd much rather take a train than drive if the implementation isn't terrible (anything between DC, Philly, and NYC, Barcelona to Madrid, Florence to Rome), largely because the time isn't wasted (I can read a book, do some work, or take a nap). I'm curious how things are going to pan out over the next 20 years, however, as some of these advantages held by not being responsible for piloting the vehicle become available to cars, and how different transportation methods are going to evolve around this. Rail has nasty failure modes due to the inherent sparse graph.
  - supergeek133 11y ago
    Yeah, to your point, that is why some people like to fly these days. It's almost literally the last place you can go and work uninterrupted! Haha.
    - flatline 11y ago
      Used to be a fairly quick way to get around, but since 9/11 the unpredictable security delays and increasingly cramped seating have made it far less tenable. Even a 1 hour flight involves a ~45 minute trip to the airport - including time to park and walk to the terminal; a 2+ hour wait through security because it could take three quarters of that; the hour flight itself; time to disembark at the terminal - bare minimum we are talking a solid 4 hours which could easily turn into 5+ with a not-infrequent delay. You are no longer much ahead of the curve for an equivalent drive of less than 350 miles, at the end of which you would have a car. The expense of flying is prohibitive, and I can't even open my work laptop in the plane because it's a behemoth.

teek 11y ago

> Putting that problem aside for a moment, it says that transit gets a smaller share of the funding pie. So what? Roads blanket the nation--I don't think this article would suggest operating public transportation to compete with every road. If you're going to use the argument that roads are more useful than transit because they cover the whole nation, then you're making the same argument the article is making for transit, just with different parameters. Rather than paint it black and white, both systems are needed to increase overall transportation efficiency as a whole. Transit is effective in dense areas like large cities. Roads are effective in smaller less dense areas where space isn't a premium. Additionally, everyone likes to gloss over the fact that you mention where public transit in the US is largely government owned and operated, therefore the expenses include all costs associated with the entire system. For roads, however, only the road cost is covered. This is a different kind of unfairness. It makes roads and auto travel look cheap because costs are dispersed over different parties and items: government pays for the road, drivers pay for their car and maintenance, buildings hide the cost of private parking. Meanwhile transit systems look expensive because the numbers include all associated expenses. To fix the problem, I actually think transit systems should be allowed to be privatized and treated on the same level as roads, that is just like roads, the government allocates land use for mass transit and private companies operate the system. Additionally most of the recent laws surrounding (free) parking and the interstate highway systems require additional roads and parking for every new development. So ridiculous things start happening like low-income housing in a dense area having unused parking spaces being built to satisfy minimum parking requirements. Downtown road improvements requiring unnecessarily large intersections and allocations to satisfy level of service requirements. > Then there's the usual "OMG induced demand": "road building as already mentioned does nothing to combat traffic" because of induced demand. This is specious. Yes building roads encourages people to go places. That's the point. The problem is roads are a 2D system with limited scalability while cities are 3D environments that often scale in 3 dimensions. Furthermore automobiles most of the time are used to inefficiently carry 1 person but they have a large footprint. So at a certain point, traffic congestion measures actually do not increase throughput linearly based on investment. So if you want "people to go places" you start finding yourself with ridiculously expensive projects that actually just end up making the problem worse. Many cities in the world have found solutions to traffic problems and they involve one of 2 things: 1. Introduce a toll or congestion fee thereby encouraging only those that truly want to use the road to use it. 2. Remove high capacity "arterial" roads thus causing traffic to be more evenly distributed across multiple low throughput paths. The first item operates on the concept that even a relatively small fee will cause standard supply and demand rules to apply rather than users aggressively trying to take advantage of a "free" resource. The second item operates on the concept that traffic distributed across more direct paths will lead to less overall system traffic compared to a system that encourages everyone to take the perceived fastest and highest throughput path.